Ah, the perennial edu discuss.
Old white guy = me. Why did I write that? I don’t know, maybe it will blend in somewhere.
Birdseye view of k-4 thru 12 today, IMO. Below is a boxing ring, in one corner is school admin, next is teachers corner, next is parents corner, and last and possibly least is kids corner. DING! and everybody comes out swinging, of course, I’m referring to virtual smash hits not real contacts, though some may have a different take on this in today’s halls of education. I guess what is considered an effective hit is a record or memo to and from the participants. After all, we are somewhat of a record crazy society.
Now Mark, your paragraph one is exactly my experience and looking back I consider that K-6 time as a real utopia/nirvana era, I mean dammit everything seemed to just work. I loved that part of your story, took me right back. I could be wearing my rose-colored time travel glasses, but, ahhh, no it was a great time and memory.
Yes, middle school was not as fun as the earlier grades in total but, middle school is always problematic, it was the ’60s and though many of us, not all, out in the burbs were getting 3 squares and a decent place to sleep, etc.
Highschool near the end of the ’60s had its issues also but still was interesting to me. (Sidebar confessions: In H.S. I thought all my English teachers, except maybe one, were somehow out to get me. Nowadays I know that was me. I mean I thought, heck why are we taking another English course, we already speak the language, cheeee! :-) )
About school politics today, I think parents don’t have much of a clue what is going on internally with all the school infrastructural red tape, especially between the teachers and school admins. There is so much bureaucratic crap going on as well as a major discrepancy in career income, and that is accelerating greatly in this day and age. IMO we have top-heavy administrations everywhere. I blame a lot of this on trigger-happy parents, (ex: ‘ hey, it looked funny to me, we are going to sue your asses’) that would be us. Non-involvement in knowing what it takes or what's going on regarding educating their (parent’s) children is helping to sink our public schools. The fact that many adults do not trust the instructional teaching staff is a systemic killer issue from the get-go. This evolution says to me, that teachers, though, explicitly key to getting our kids educated, are not in charge of mentorship or guidance, they have too much (and here comes proof I should have buckled down in English) Bull Shit to put up with.
Some of this stuff I refer too is similar to your early experience, but back in our day, there were always some new and improved methods that supposedly beat out older methods. I noticed this in Middle school mostly. Consider the math of middle school, when suddenly set theory was the mathematical theory hero of the day, then back to classic methods, then more math styles before H.S. fine-fine, I have nothing against Set theory or any other Math roulette of the day theory being presented, it’s great. But this also affects the teaching staff possibly being jerked around year after year with some downstream, should I say it, collateral damage. (Not to mention parents being fluxumed (?) by all this- hey, it’s in the urban dictionary.) So all and all we had and still have a great school district, in a University town where many support education. I’d say much of the problem is, (now please don’t kill me) parents not understanding the education process and when they don’t they add to the dysfunctional bureaucracy crap pile with all kinds of misguided ideas. Armchair Monday morning quarterbacks if you will.
That’s enough surface scratching for now. Oh to be young again. :-)
